Salient

This week I featured in an article in the Sunday Star Times about teenage rebellion and delinquency. Oh dear.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a column on the permanent and clichéd act of teenage rebellion that is my lower-back tribal tattoo. When a Sunday Star Times reporter called, asking if she could interview me about the said tattoo, I was naturally so amused that I accepted.

“Some choose to be ‘conformers’, which means they set goals like making top sports teams or getting good marks. But others decide to be ‘non conformers’, and set goals such as breaking school rules and getting in trouble with police”, the reporter wrote.

Good God. I thought it was an innocent act of rebellion, but it seems that I’m destined for jail.

I was a bit of prat when I was a teenager. A hopelessly clever and misunderstood prat, of course. But we’ve all done silly things, right? I’m…I’m not going to jail, right?

The only upside to my being lumped in the ‘criminal-to-be’ category is that my inbox has since been flooded with emails describing other stories of teenage rebellion. I realise that not everyone turns into a post-pubescent prick during this period of their lives, but I’ve had a number of wonderful conversations with those of us who did.

I can empathise with Rachael, who sometimes found herself doing odd things with the simple goal of annoying her parents. Rachael’s parents are religious, which was a great source of fun for her as a teenager. She enjoyed herself mightily, she said, as she scattered pregnancy tests around her house as a thirteen-year-old virgin.

Teenagers like Ant found great fun in trying to outwit their parents. When Ant’s father bet him $1000 that he couldn’t complete a near-impossible puzzle, he bought the solution book and claimed the money. Realising that his father might question him completing a puzzle with a one-in-a-million success rate, he said that the cat knocked an integral piece in place. Ant has all the makings of a very successful lawyer.

Dating a bad-boy boyfriend is even more cliché than getting a tattoo. When fourteen-year-old Caitlin asked her mother what she thought of her boyfriend, she replied “he looks like a heroine addict”. Caitlin threw a GameBoy at her head. A little unfair, she admits, as he was a heroine addict.

Almost every reformed vagabond I spoke to had an inexplicable hatred of letterboxes in their teenage years. A friend of mine took it upon himself to build “a letterbox mountain”, and another collected one hundred number ‘7’s from his unfortunate neighbours.

Another thing we all had in common was the consumption of rocket fuel—that lethal mixture of whatever happened to be in Mummy and Daddy’s liquor cabinet at the time. When my poor father went out for a drink he would exclaim “gosh this gin is strong!”—totally unaware that he had been drinking watered-down spirits for years.

I remember once stealing a magnum of sparkling wine and sharing it with my friends in the local park. ‘Genius’, I thought, as I filled it with water and smashed it on the kitchen floor the next morning. I mopped it up in front of them, my fake tears dripping visibly into the puddle of ‘wine’. Guilt racked me for a few hours, until I ended up admitting my crime whilst in floods of genuine tears. I think the leniency of their punishment of me reflected a certain pride in their daughter’s problem solving abilities.

Worse, though, than all of this, is the poetry we wrote as teenagers. Most youths should be banned from the art, or at least discouraged from using the words ‘angst’, ‘chasm’, ‘soul’ and ‘void’. Susan Townsend’s character Adrian Mole exemplifies this perfectly:

PANDORA! PANDORA! PANDORA!

By Adrian Mole

Oh! my love, My heart is yearning, My mouth is dry, My soul is burning. You’re in Tunisia, I am here. Remember me and shed a tear. Come back tanned and brown and healthy. You’re lucky that your dad is wealthy.

She will be back in six days.

Teenagers, like first years, cop a lot of unfair flack. Not everyone reaches fourteen and decides that it’s necessary to fuck authority with a Sex Pistols doll, nor do all first years get repeatedly trapped in the automatic doors.

It is a natural reaction to get frustrated and offended when we’re automatically judged because of age or our position in the meaningless hierarchy of university.

But let’s not take ourselves too seriously, eh? Teenagers are often prats, or at least I was. And first years, I know it seems mortifying to be laughed at whilst trying to wrench your backpack out of the automatic doors, but trust me, when next year comes about and you spot a flailing first year sandwiched between those heavy doors, you’ll laugh too. It’s funny.

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